Utilizing Microsoft Flow to create summary emails for edison365ideas

This article walks through building an example weekly email summary for edison365ideas data using Microsoft Flow.

This example will email a list of edison365ideas that are in the “Under Review” stage but this could easily be updated to email of ideas data if required.

The process to create a Flow-based email summary

Firstly, log in to office.com and access Flow or navigate straight to https://flow.microsoft.com

Click “My Flows” from the left navigation menu then New > Create from blank:

Click Create from blank:

This will load the new blank Flow canvas:

Click the Untitled text and name the Flow, for example, “Weekly edison365ideas Summary”. Then type recurrence in the input box:

Now click the Recurrence trigger then set the Frequency to Week:

At this point, you can click More to specify other options such as Start time but that is not required. This will control what triggers the Flow to run. Click the + New step button and type SharePoint as we now need a SharePoint Action:

In the list of actions, select Send an HTTP request to SharePoint:

Using the menu, click Rename:

Rename that action to something more meaningful such as “Get UnderReview ideas”.

Next, complete the required properties for the action as per below:

 

Site Address: The SharePoint Online Site Collection URL where edison365ideas is deployed

Method: GET

Uri:

/_api/web/lists/GetByTitle(‘Ideas’)/Items?$Select=Title,edisonShortLink&$Filter=edisonIdeaStage/Title eq ‘Under Review’

Headers: Key: Accept Value: application/json; odata=nometadata

 

This can be seen below:

This action will get a list of edison365ideas that are in the “Under Review” stage, if the requirement was for a different set of ideas, update the Uri property to return the correct list of edison365ideas.

This is just a standard SharePoint list REST API query, details can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/sp-add-ins/get-to-know-the-sharepoint-rest-service

Click the + New step button and type select as we now need a Select Action:

Click Select from the list of Actions. Click the From property and a panel will appear on the right-hand side, click Expression then enter the following in the expression function input:

body(‘Get_UnderReview_ideas’)[‘value’]

Click OK. Now click the T outlined in red below to switch the text mode:

In the Map property enter the following:

“<a href=’https://links.edison365.com/@{item()?[‘edisonShortLink’]}’>@{item()?[‘Title’]}</a>”

The select step is used to create the hyperlink from the data returned from SharePoint.

Click the + New step button and type join as we now need a Join Action:

Click Join from the list of Actions. Click the From property and a panel will appear on the right-hand side, click Output from the Select section to add the output value from the previous Select action:

Type the following in the Join with property, <br/> in the Join with property, this is used to put each idea on a new row:

Finally click + New step and type email as we now need a Send an email Action:

In the To property, enter the email address for the recipient then enter the email subject. Click the Show advanced options and set Is HTML to Yes:

Click Hide advanced options.

In the Body, type the email body such as:

Now click Output under the Join heading from the right-hand content window:

The Flow is now ready to be tested. Click Save to save the Flow. Now click the Test in the top right corner:

Then select the option for I’ll perform the trigger action and click Save & Test:

Then click Run Flow in the pop up that appears. The Flow should execute successfully:

The recipient should then receive an email containing a list of all edison365ideas that are under review with clickable hyperlinks to open the idea in edison365ideas: